The Ballet

No one can tell you what life and love are like.  There are so many things that are simply notions of our minds until we experience them ourselves.  I suppose it’s the limits of empathy, we can never completely put ourselves in someone else’s place, because at some point our imaginations are limited to what they know. 

I’ve learned this about knowing grief.  There are profound experiences I understand via pain that have taught me more than I care to know.  But my capacity for empathy has expanded and thus my capacity to love has as well.   

The same is true of knowing love. Today is Valentines Day. Trever and I don’t make a thing of it, we usually celebrate later in the week when the crowds have dissipated and so have the prices. 

But 13 years ago was our first Valentines Day and our first real date, I was 16 and he picked me up at my dad’s house in Anaheim Hills wearing a suit that was likely two sizes too big. I was wearing a choker necklace representative of the circle of life, or the circle of fashion, as it were.  We had been together for close to a year at that point but because of my age, or more likely because of his (20), we had to wait to officially date. But finally on February 14th, 2004 he took me to the ballet and after we drove to the beach blaring Deathcab. 

I look back at us and what we were, and as beautiful as it was I’m amazed at the distance we’ve come, amazed at the life we’ve lived.  Somewhere along the way we learned to love, which has a lot to do with choosing. But I think more than that we became capable of love as we knew it from each other, it seems that I had to be loved to be able to love in return.

And then to motherhood. I’ve watched so many of my friends melt into puddles when they became mothers and I could not seem to attain a sense of comprehension for what looked like a loss of self from my view.  And yet now there is a scary love growing within me, a love for one who never could have loved me first. Tiny arms and legs keep kicking me all day and every time it happens I am nothing but a mother.  

I can only assume there are unknowable depths of love as we live life. I find it interesting that this one word holds so much.  Something that swirls itself in and through our beings and lives and attaches us to those around us.  As it intertwines itself and unites us to others our beings become less and less singular and more and more a piece of connection, and ultimately the connection itself is what we’re made of.

My dad wrote me a letter today.  He outlined bits of my life and like a poem ended each stanza with, “and then I loved you more.” I sobbed. I’ve always known he loved me and yet only now do I know that I never ever came close to really knowing his love. I’ve expanded a bit and can now begin to grasp a little more of what I thought I always knew.

I hope this is true of the divine, that we are incapable of understanding the depths of love One has for us. As we grow in love through friendship, family and marriage, I can only assume that by the slow growth of love over time can we come close to comprehension and even then fall extraordinarily short. 

Happy Valentines Day. 

Irrelevant

Remember how I told you that I was doing ok, that the pain of the failed pregnancy was surprisingly dull? Well that didn’t last long. Thanks to chlomid and other factors, what began as a humming ache progressed into bat. shit. crazy.  I hate to admit that I am not in any way exaggerating this point.  I am literally losing my mind, which is something I said to Trever last night when I crawled in bed after an hour of sobbing hysterically.  I wasn’t even crying about pregnancy or motherhood, I’m actually not thinking about that much.  But the grief of everything and the constant hormonal tweaking is causing feelings to sprout up into my orderly and predictable mind.  This makes a circumstance that might call for a glossy eyed nearly-cry escalate quickly and without any sense of control into absolute and total mania.

It was while I still maintained some semblance of rational behavior before the great melt down that I met with Ash to discuss prayer.  He asked me where God was in all of this.  We were in a loud starbucks and people were walking in and out so I kept getting distracted and looking away, while desperately hoping that the question might itself become distracted and walk away as well.  After a socially unacceptable amount of silence and delay I turned back to Ash and all I could say is, “He’s irrelevant.” 

I don’t think prayer changes things, I don’t think God speaks back, I don’t think God intervenes hardly at all, I think there’s a chance He comforts us but I doubt it, and I really don’t think there’s much relationship to be had in that sense.  I have come to terms with God’s existence, I’m making progress in accepting His goodness, I do not however think I can manage to believe He’s relational with us. I told Ash all of this, I told him how I tried to study and practice prayer in faith and it felt disingenuous and false and so I stopped.  Just to give another quick shout out to the psychedelic rave my emotions are throwing in my brain, it is because of them I no longer have a filter.  Was it necessary to clarify that?

Ash asked me if it’s possible that I’m waiting for God to respond to me, but that I’m only allowing Him to respond on my terms.  He asked if it was possible that God was actually right there in the emotions and I wasn’t recognizing His presence.  I contemplated this, I maybe even felt a little convicted by it.  I quietly vowed to practice faith in a relationship with God whatever that might look like.

Then I had an emotional breakdown last night referred to previously, woke up the next morning and felt like I had been drunk on feelings the night before, like they had taken me over and I felt like a fool.  So I took back my vow, if God’s in my emotions He’s really unstable, and if He is in circumstances He’s even more unstable, and if He speaks through visions he has an unhealthy obsession with sail boats, all of these things equally concern me. Let’s all, in hope for my salvation, pray that God tunes us out when we’re on synthetic hormones.

In the meantime I have virtually no control over the way I feel right now, so I will do the only thing I can control which is input.  So I am inputting all the time, as in if I’m not watching Ryan and Marissa quarrel with the passions of a soap opera then I’m hiking or doing yoga or pretty much anything but letting my mind sit still. I will now be leaving to go to Peter’s Canyon where I will hike the hill to the top where there always seem to be a vague scent of maple syrup in the air.   In my thorough assessment the scent is due either to a bizarre maple essence plant or else an elaborate scheme from IHOP to make tired and hungry hikers subconsciously crave breakfast foods.  Either way, the contemplation of the schemes of nature to make us clueless homo-sapiens crave sugar keeps me from being angry, which is really all I’m hoping for at this point, non-anger. Goals.

Insomniac

Yesterday I sat down next to my pastor and friend Josh and he asked me how my studying was going.  He had just spent the last weekend very articulately and wisely making a compelling and academic case for the Bible. It’s a fine balance, someone who can present at a high intellectual level on huge topics like the trustworthiness of scripture and yet invoke in a congregant the honest truth of questions.  I know Josh has well formulated answers to all my questions, and yet he would so silently listen to my elementary angst and find ways to relate to my struggle.

I told him that this whole contemplative prayer study was not working or I was doing it wrong, but either way I was really missing the lesson in it.  I explained the ways I tried to pray like I believed God listened and responded when I’m just not sure he does, which feels more like pretending and less like faith. I described the only thing that has changed in me which is a deep grief over the brokenness of this world from mass shootings to lost loved ones, and how things have affected me in a disproportionately personal way so all I can utter is, “Lord have Mercy”.

We explored a couple of ideas, the first being that it may be that I am not naturally wired to experience God in this way.  Just like anything else in life humans variate on what ways of interacting with God they’re more inclined towards.  The idea we explored was that contemplation isn’t an end in itself. Prayer is only meant to change us so that we become compassionate for the brokenness of this world. 

I was talking to my friend Annette about this at dinner tonight.  She would tell me sometimes that she would wake up in the middle of the night with a deep empathy for someone and find herself praying for them.  I have been on the receiving end of this prayer many many times before and it has always meant so much to me, so much that I wish I could be that for others.  But I can't figure out how to. 

I’m on these hormones for our IVF treatment and they are giving me insomnia.  Typically I’m the type of person that could pretty much always sleep.  I never wake up in the night, fall asleep quickly and could probably nap every day too if I had time and no goals.  Sleep and I have a happy relationship, we welcome each other with open arms and I’m pretty sure people that have a hard time sleeping hate me, because I brag about my long nights of unconscious bliss.  So Annette hates me a little I think, she would never say that but when we shared a bed in New York and she fell asleep at sunrise I can’t help but think she glared at me across the darkened room for leaving her alone in the wake.

The universe is paying me back for all of my cat-like sleeping so now I get to stare at my ceiling and contemplate life’s great questions while the hours slow to a snails pace.  I got up the other night at 4:00am and started doing lunges around my house, because why the hell not? I read a book, watched a few episodes of Gilmore Girls (don’t judge me, I can’t handle that right now), did some instagram stalking, laid in pigeon pose for a while and finally sleep found me…for a hot second.

When I woke up again I remembered how Annette uses her time to pray for people.  I thought about how generous that is and the great use of the endless minutes in the middle of the night. I thought about using my time wisely like her, then I got mad about being awake and went in the living room to waste more time.  Ok so I failed.

The hard thing about intercession is that is really forces the question of God’s intervention.  I cannot say with any sense of clarity whether or not God intervenes in this life, essentially whether or not prayer changes things.  It seems to passionately pray for someone means that you believe that your prayers will do something, that prayer is not in fact, only a tool used to change who we are but could actually change circumstances.  I told you about this woman I have been following on instagram who has five children and her husband has been sick with stage four melanoma.  They are very young and vibrant and he was a body builder and now looks like a pre-pubescent boy.  I have been watching him slowly loss the battle with cancer via social media and although I have no idea who this woman is I cannot stop thinking about what a tragedy this is.  It’s really weighed on me in abnormally personal ways and when she finally posted that he has passed away I couldn’t sleep.  I kept thinking of her and repeating, “Lord have mercy.”

I cannot say if this prayer mattered or if was just an unharnessed amount of empathy, but if there is anything to say to the brokenness of this world it’s that, “Lord have mercy.”

Heaven Forgive Me

There is a security that comes with being raised in a specific system of belief, but there is also a great struggle if one needs to questions this system.  When educations, degrees, worldviews, spouses, friendships and sources of hope are all connected to a belief, it takes a lot of fire in one’s soul to ask even the smallest question of it.

I found myself here a couple of years ago, with a masters degree and a career in Christian work, not to mention everything else in my life wrapped up in a hope of a Christian God.  It began with a few small questions about the specifics of theological understandings, which opened up more inquisitions.  One after another the questions came all linked, each query connected to and dependent upon another.   So further and further I extended into the unknown and an examination of my faith, I wandered with trepidation, until I was at the very base of it all –Is there a God?

My assumption through this whole process has always been that I would go on my little journey of faith just to find myself back where I started with nothing but a better understanding of why I believe the same thing I’ve always believed.  It’s curious though, it turns out to be really authentic when asking a question you must be willing to find whatever answer is really true, and open to the possibility that you might have been wrong all along.

I remember listening to a ted talk radio hour about believers and doubters.  The first interview was with the daughter of a well known Christian evangelist and when asked if her father ever doubted she said, “no, because God’s a gentlemen and he doesn’t lie.” I grabbed that phrase out of the air and held it in my hand as if examining a fly, something I had seen a million times but never really looked at. It was flimsy, and suddenly that statement felt like the mascot for all the defensive answers that have been shelled out to me when asking questions of faith. As I was staring at this philosophical fly in my hand another interview came on with a woman describing her experience of leaving the Christian faith and I related to her.  She was honest, she felt authentic like she wasn’t covering for anyone or anything, and I had a terrifying sense of relief at what it might be like to just let it all go and to stop this scrappy fight for faith.  I was petrified because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to believe, afraid it might not be true, afraid that everything my life was based on was false, but mostly afraid that this existence might actually be that hopeless.  So I had a breakdown and sobbed in my car for the foundation that I felt was falling out from under me, the very basis for hope being ripped from my view of the world. 

It’s all the risk we take to fully understand something, but a risk we must take all the same. Unclenching our fingers in hopes that the truth remains, that we might still believe at the end of our search.

In his book Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton describes his own experience of exploration of his faith like a sailor looking to discover new land, finding himself on what he thinks is an undiscovered island on the south seas, only to realize it’s still England. 

“I fancied I was the first to set food in Brighton and then found I was the last.  It recounts my elephantine adventures in the pursuit of the obvious.  Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth.  And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it.  When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom.  It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing tradition of civilized religion.”

Maybe it’s a fools errand for there is no undiscovered land.  Or maybe the whole point is that the adventure on the high seas is really what makes us who we are. So I’m getting on a boat to see what I find, tears streaming for the innocent faith I once held, but a heart pounding for the truth I’m desperate to find.

This is a place where I will recount such a journey, of learning about and understanding my faith from 5 perspectives within the Christian tradition.  I'm hopeful along the way that I'll find God...

That He'll find me.

That I'll find me.